Guns and greed

A promising TV season ends in excess

by Robert David Sullivan

Frasier

It doesn't offend my moral sensibilities that the six stars of Friends will get $750,000 each per episode next season. None of that money was coming to me anyway, and it's always entertaining to watch people get upset at entertainers' salaries, as if there were any profession without a thin crust of overpaid prima donnas. But I am concerned -- in the harmless, no-need-for-medication way in which I obsess over television programs -- that there won't be enough left in the budget for guest stars and new supporting characters. It didn't help when I read in Entertainment Weekly that the actors really are friends and that they stuck together during contract talks so NBC couldn't make any cost-cutting cast replacements. (With the networks cancelling 25 sit-coms this season, there are lots of irritating actors looking for jobs.) This is a little too much inside information, and I might have trouble separating the players from their roles: is the sit-com about six pals who can't form relationships with anyone outside their tight circle, or is it about six insecure actors who won't let anyone else on their gravy train? The blurred line between fiction and reality suggests a Woody Allen movie, as do all the Friends story lines about vast age differences between romantic partners.

The hooking up of Chandler and Monica, admittedly a Friends masterstroke, happened almost two years ago. The lame plots involving the other four characters on this season's finale prove that the series needs some new blood, but the network is not likely to permit reduced screen time for anyone pulling in almost $200,000 per shooting day. Instead, Friends, which lost 13 percent of its audience this season, will probably float gently down the ratings charts over the next few years, ending with a series finale that will disappoint everyone (as almost all series finales do, since they come several years too late).

Still, Friends isn't as bad as ER, which is straining to get the most value out of its large and expensive regular cast. Its predictable season finale turned Dr. Carter (Noah Wyle) into a drug addict, a condition that will undoubtedly be resolved in the next episode so that Anthony Edwards or Eriq LaSalle can get another crack at an Emmy. ER started this season with a great story arc involving Alan Alda as a doctor with Alzheimer's, but since then the episodes have been a blur. Patients whiz through the hospital, each of them stopping just long enough to give a doctor the opportunity to screw things up. No one wants a sappy '70s show like Medical Center, but a little more emphasis on the sick people might be in order here.

And speaking of sick people: NYPD Blue had the nerve to saddle Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) with yet another personal tragedy on its season finale. When we left Andy last week (organ music up, please), he was waiting to hear whether his kindergarten-age son has leukemia. My guess is that Andy has been poisoning his son in order to remain the center of attention in the squad room. (That's an actual medical syndrome, and one of the few memorable visitors on ER this season was a mother who got kicks out of keeping her kid sick. The producers of the show must have been sorely tempted to give the mental defect to new mother Carol Hathaway.) It's all so unnecessary, since Franz can be a compelling actor without playing Job every week. The way he reacts to all those confessions by murder suspects -- as if he were making an effort not to become used to them -- gives the show a certain realism. In contrast, the characters on The Practice listen to the details of grisly murders the way they'd listen to ethnic jokes, with a socially acceptable expression of minimal disgust.

Friends

Another disappointingly insular show is Frasier. Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde-Pierce are expert comedians playing wonderful characters, but no one else has blossomed on the show. John Mahoney made more of an impression in 10 minutes of the movie Moonstruck than he has in seven years playing Frasier's father, and the sit-com's female characters are little more than chess pieces for bedroom farces. Things got worse this season, with Daphne (Jane Leeves) and Niles (Hyde-Pierce) getting engaged to nonentities who had no chance of becoming regulars on the show. We never saw what was so appealing about these outsiders, but we never really saw what was wrong with them, either, so that when Daphne and Niles ran off together on the season finale, they seemed selfish and cruel rather than impulsive and romantic. If Daphne and Niles do stay together, Frasier will have the same regular cast it had when the show started in 1993, and that doesn't sound very funny. Someone should remind Grammer that he wouldn't have his own show if the producers of Cheers hadn't decided to add a new regular character named Frasier Crane a couple years into that sit-com's run.

Besides vaguely incestuous plot lines, this year's season finales featured a lot of angry white males with guns and explosives. The West Wing was justifiably lauded as one of this year's best new shows, in part because it was so effective in creating dramatic tension without violence. But its season finale ended with a bunch of skinheads shooting at the president and just about every regular character on the show -- a cliffhanger scene reminiscent of the Moldavian wedding massacre on Dynasty in 1985. This was another case of fixing what wasn't broken, for the two episodes before the season finale had some of the best moments of the entire TV season: the chief of staff (John Spencer) accusing the president of gutlessness; the press secretary (Allison Janey) confronting the chief of staff about being kept out of the loop; and just about any scene with the easily frustrated Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford). The sudden attempt to imitate a Clint Eastwood movie didn't fit the series, and a couple of coincidences added to the phoniness. First, the structure of the episode -- it began at night, flashed back 12 hours, and ended up at the same place where it started -- had already been used on the more subtle season finale of Once and Again the week before. Second, The West Wing was followed by a Law & Order episode that featured, as Jerry Orbach's character put it, "surf Nazis on ecstasy." What would screenwriters do if they didn't have hate groups to add a little spice to TV dramas?

Among other finales, ER featured hoodlums shooting into a schoolyard (the details of the crime are fuzzy because, of course, the story line was abandoned almost immediately), Third Watch had an ex-firefighter shooting at other firefighters, and Judging Amy gave us a guy threatening to blow up a courthouse because he lost custody of his kids. (Hell, he did blow up the courthouse, as CBS thoughtfully let us know ahead of time: the promos for this episode included the "surprise" explosion.) After all this firepower, it was a pleasant surprise that the season finale of Law & Order was a relatively low-key outing about a Chilean general's being prosecuted for the murder of an American student some 30 years ago. The NBC promo department did its best to jazz up this episode, implying that it was about a garden-variety serial killer instead of a political conspiracy; in so doing, the network inadvertently kept the suspense intact. (And the fake-outs didn't stop there: the episode ended with a Supreme Court decision, but we'll never find out what it was.)

I DON'T WANT TO END the season on a bitchy tone, so I should point out that there were some season finales that made me look forward to September. Once and Again, noted above, ended its freshman year with a delicate episode in which the families of Rick and Lily finally got together for a meal. The series also had a stinging subplot in which Lily's self-absorption costs her a friend. A ruptured friendship can cause anyone to re-evaluate his or her life, but how often do we see this played out on a television series? (Almost never, because friends -- and Friends -- on TV are bound together by seven-year contracts.) Throughout the season, Once and Again was the only drama that never overexposed its regular characters. It's full of supporting cast members -- playing ex-spouses, siblings, co-workers, and classmates -- who showed up just long enough to pique my interest, and for that reason it may be the series that I'm most looking forward to in September.

Despite its courthouse explosion, the closing episodes of Judging Amy established the show as an improvement over the similarly themed Providence. But take pity on the state of Connecticut: the superior Amy barely acknowledges its Hartford locale, whereas the sappy Providence makes Rhode Island seem like a perfect-weather paradise. The writing on this show can get mushy, but the cast avoids cuteness, and I was relieved to learn that Tyne Daly's character does not have Alzheimer's disease. (Alan Alda was enough for one season.)

A few other shows ended the season on high notes. Will & Grace showed one of Jack's tricks (a dimwit named Fernando) and edged closer toward forcing viewers to imagine two guys having sex. And though the midseason replacement Titus is still searching for its voice, creator and star Christopher Titus is at least trying to steer away from the dying sit-com genre. The season ended with Dad (Stacy Keach) apparently suffering a heart attack. Titus, on the set where he talks directly to the camera, flashed a nervous grin and turned off the bare lightbulb, keeping us in the dark for the next four months.

In the meantime, we'll have cable TV and CBS's summertime experiment with the voyeuristic shows Survivor (real people on a desert island) and Big Brother (real people living in a house full of cameras). If these actor-free programs take off, there may not be many Friends-sized paychecks in Hollywood's future.